Someone in LA County...tell me this isn't still happening

Great Debates
1

I just finished reading Bias by Bernard Goldberg, and in it he had a story about this horrible situation going on in LA County, California. The story aired in 1998, I can only hope the situation has since been remedied.

District Attorney Gil Garcetti was going after deadbeat dads. The problem was, many men were being forced to pay child support for children that were not theirs. They even had accurate DNA evidence proving this, yet the DA’s response was, “Oh well.”

Apparently, the way the law was written, you were served a notice of back child support and given 30 days to respond. If you didn’t, a default judgement was entered and the child support was taken out of your paycheck before the you got it. Proof of paternity did not matter.

One man, who had been in this country for 30 years, received a notice that he owed $206,000 in child support. His wife nearly divorced him over his “secret life,” and they had a very hard time, even with DNA evidence proving he wasn’t the father, getting the bureaucrats off his back.

Another poor man, married with two children, was named by an ex-girlfriend as the father of her baby. She had to put someone’s name on the birth certificate to get welfare and he was it. He had the DNA proof, the DA said, “So what” and he was forced to get a second job to pay child support for a child THAT IS NOT HIS.
This, of course, takes him away from his own children.

Gil Garcetti’s response to all this was “The law is the law.”

Now, granted, this happened a few years ago, but I would like to know if anyone has any up-to-date information on this situation. I cannot believe a gov’t would force a man to pay child support when he had DNA evidence proving he is not the father.

2

Did you look at the LA County DA website?

Garcetti is no longer the DA. He was not re-elected in 2000. Perhaps Garcetti’s policy is gone, too. There is no mention of it on the web site.

3

If paternity is contested, no man can be ordered to pay child support without a court proceeding establishing his paternity. Period.

4

Um, I’m pretty sure that this isn’t true. If a person is acting in the role of parent, courts have ruled that for all intents they are the parent, regardless of a biological connection. The rights of the child are ruled to be paramount, even if the person paying child support is not the biological father.

I don’t have a cite, but there were several threads about this before the Troubles.

5

It sounds to me like the story is more about default judgements than paternity. When you don’t respond to a lawsuit you lose.

6

I looked up the story out of curiosity and it has nothing to do with the issue you raise Telemark. It seems that a program was instituted to find absent fathers that had all the accuracy of Florida’s voter purge program. Large numbers of men who had never met the mother let alone fathered a child were sued as a result. For those that responded to the allegations it was an expensive irritation. Those who ignored the notice or never saw it due to rules of substitute service were left with default judgements against them.

In most jurisdictions you have to show a reason why you didn’t respond and demonstrate you have a case. The Garcetti quote related to a man who had failed to respond but still showed a pretty startling lack of humanity. The court of appeal disagreed with him finding even a shitty excuse was sufficient with clear dna evidence particularly given the high level of government involvement in what would normally be a civil action.

Apparently changes were made to the system to minnimize false identifications but articles I came accross suggested the problem had not been entirely eliminated.

Off topic but given that the press unanimously villified Garcetti, who is a democrat in name at least, it is hard to understand what role the story played in Bias. Ivylass, how did he tie this into a theme of liberal bias in the media?

7

Garcetti lost his re-election bid for reasons other than the “deadbeat dad” issue.

See, there was this murder trial of a former football player and …

Garcetti also loved the “Three Strikes” sentencing rules to the point of clogging up the courts.

And he had many other blunders.

8

You seem to be referring to the concept of “presumed fatherhood,” which is (in a nutshell) the legal principle that if you have or had a certain kind of relationship with the mother at the time of conception or appear to have accepted the child as your own, you are most likely the father. There are two reasons why it’s inapplicable to my statement above.

First, presumed fatherhood is a rebuttable presumption. It’s basically a rule of evidence that says if there isn’t any other good evidence of who’s the biological daddy, we’re going to say it’s you because your behavior shows you fit the bill. But if there is good evidence showing you’re not the bio dad–and DNA, if done properly, is the best evidence there is–the presumption will be rebutted and the court will not find you to be the father.

Second, presumed fatherhood only comes into play at all when there is a court proceeding to establish paternity, usually in the context of a suit for child support. A court absolutely cannot order child support without determining that the defendant is the father of the child. Usually, paternity isn’t contested, so the issue is merely a formality. But if the defendant claims he is not the father, that’s where the rebuttable presumption of paternity comes into play (if the facts warrant it), as well as other evidence of paternity. A court will not foreclose inquiry into the child’s actual paternity merely because the defendant has acted as the child’s father.

There is one caveat, however. If a previous judicial proceeding has already established that the man is the father of the child, all the DNA evidence in the world is not going to make the courts budge from that decision. There are no do-overs when it comes to establishing paternity, and that includes cases where the defendant was properly served with notice of the suit and failed to appear in court, resulting in a default judgment. It’s an unfair approach in some cases, but the judicial policy in this regard finality over revisiting the issue again and again.

9

It was in a chapter titled Male-Bashing, and how the liberal media (I know that’s up for debate, I’m just referring to how he called it) got away with male-bashing. For instance, he referred to Katie Couric talking to a jilted bride, and apparently perky Katie asked her if she had considered castration. That was ha-ha funny, but Goldberg submitted how the situation would be different if Matt Lauer, talking to a jilted groom, had asked if the man had considered cutting off his ex-fiancee’s breasts. Hmmm…not so funny.

Basically, the chapter was about how the media bash white men, yet if you turn around and use the same epithets against other minorites it would cause a huge uproar. It was all about respect.